The long awaited new guidelines for the Canada Media Fund were unveiled today. Heritage Minister James Moore and Valerie Creighton President and CEO of the CMF made the announcement today to a packed room of television and new media producers. You can see the new guidelines here. The fund represents $350 Million of funding for television and new media production.
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I highly recommend you check out Collette Jackson's blog related to Digital Game Based Learning and our soon to be launched educational site for Aboriginal youth ‘On the Path of the Elders'. Collette recently joined the BlackCherry team as our Content and Marketing Specialist. She provides some fresh insight into the motivations, philosophies and approaches employed to create this unique resource.
You can find the blog here:
Path of the Elders Blog
Path of the Elders will launch March 24th, 2010. The new version of the site will include video archives of Elder interviews, historic audio recordings and photo archives. The centerpiece of the site is a unique educational role playing game (RPG).
The site can be found here:
On the Path of the Elders
Look for an in depth case study on this ground breaking project coming soon.
!Xabbu was silent for a long moment. They hung side by side, twin stars floating in an empty black sky, two angels gazing down from heaven at the immensity of humankind’s commercial imagination.
Otherland: The City of the Golden Shadow, Tad Williams
For anyone not familiar with Virtual Worlds, they are massive, online environments where people can meet, interact and play. Any definition is inevitably a simplification of the actual level of development these online worlds represent. People, in virtual worlds are no longer merely playing a game, they are living out a parallel existence where they have relationships, wage epic battles, get married, have virtual children, buy and sell goods such as clothing and real-estate, go to virtual online clubs for entertainment, change their appearance, hold down jobs, create empires, kill and be killed, learn and educate. In essence, if it exists in the real world, it exists in the virtual world. Virtual world inhabitants are living a virtual life driven as much by imagination, hope, vanity, desire, ambition, and sex as is their everyday life in the real world.
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Microsoft XBox Project Natal:
Using new 3D motion capturing technologies, Microsoft claims it can turn your body into the new style of video game controller. Nevermind those old quickcam games where you just end up flaying your arms around while hoping to hit something. This is TOTAL body immersion. You can now drive a car with an invisible steering wheel, block hundreds of soccerballs with your body and karatekick your way through evil ninjas.
VIDEO DEMO
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Lately I’ve been reading an interesting book, ‘Proust was a Neuroscientist’, by Jonah Lehrer. In the book Lehrer makes the case for artists discovering or outlining scientific concepts well in advance of scientific confirmation of these ideas. It’s a great read and the connections the author points out are really compelling insights. As I think about the premise of the book I realise there are many examples of similar cross-pollinations related to the field of new media. I thought I’d list some examples I’ve found interesting. What I find interesting about all these example is they are people re-thinking creative processes that many would consider fully evolved.
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I came across an interesting company this week Foomojo, they are the makers of Foopets. Foopets are virtual pets that you can embed on your webpage, a kind of web-based Tamagochi.
Here’s mine:
I’ll give a disclaimer right now, I love pets, especially dogs. I have a flesh and blood border collie at home, but I hate these types of service toys/apps (as cute as they may be). By service toys/apps I mean you have to be constantly at their service. If mine appears to be dying or unhealthy please refer to my disclaimer above. I also think I would have found this product much more interesting if I hadn’t given my kids Nintendogs for their DS’s a year or so ago. Foopets seems to be a very similar, although somewhat less developed, version of this popular DS game. There is innovation here though, one that I’m surprised Nintendo didn’t jump on.
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Sometimes, the scope of the digital media world can be staggering.
These numbers, taken from MacArthur Foundation President, Jonathan F. Fanton's recent essay 'Applying Technology to Make a Difference' are impressive to say the least:
- The power of computers will continue to double every two years or so into the foreseeable future.
- There are over 1 billion Internet users worldwide — a number expected to double in the next five years.
- One-third of American homes have broadband Internet access. Rates are even higher elsewhere: half of Japanese households and two-thirds of South Korean homes have broadband, at more than ten times the speed of the average U.S. connection.
- There are over 75 million sites on the World Wide Web; 17.5 million new websites were created in 2005.
- There are over 30 million active blogs worldwide; some 75,000 more are added each day.
- In 2002, more than five exabytes of information were produced throughout the world — the equivalent of 37,000 Libraries of Congress.
- There are nearly 2 billion cell-phone users worldwide, which means that almost one-third of the global population has a mobile phone.
In addition, specifically related to youth in the U.S. :
- About 83 percent of young people between the ages of 8 and 18 play video games regularly.
- 72 percent use instant messaging.
- On a typical day, more than half of U.S. teenagers use a computer and more than 40 percent play a video game.
You can read the full essay here.